Booking.com They cancelled my reservation two day before departure and offered no compensation

Everyone knows booking.com right? It is the most used website to book an accomodation. They claim that it's easy, best price guaranteed, and also they say the reservation is guaranteed. This means that is something happens (of course problems can occur sometimes) they are supposed to take care of it.

In my case, I made a reservation for my holidays quite in advance, I wanted a nice hotel with some amenities. The  hotel has free cancellation option. Two days after this free cancellatio in snot possible anymore, too close to the arrival date, the hotel sent me via Booking.com a message asking to cancel as they have some legal issues and won't be able to host me. This was alread unbelievable.

Of course if I was going to cancel I had to pay almost the whole amount of money! I had to fight through that horrible chat they provide now on the website to let the hotel understand that they should have cancelled from their side otherwise I had to pay and of course I did not want to! I then tried to have some help from booking.com, at the end they are the intermediate they should have done something, offer me some form of compnsation.

At this point in time it is impossible to find a similar hotel for a similar price. But the only email I got offered me instead a very cheap accomodation as alternative ( not for fre clearly), but was cheap also in the sense of much worse reviews and definitely not comparable with my first choice. I was deeply disapponted. I tried to reply that it did not seem fair, I would have expect at least a comparable hotels and in case that the first hotel, who cancelled my reservation, paid the difference in price.

But no, after that email I did not hear anything. And if we consider that this happened two days before my departure... well... I think it is pretty unbelivable.